Overlays, Motherboards, and USB ports, oh my!

Wow it has been forever since I updated the blog. Well since the last post, I have played a ton of arcade games, had some arcade parties, and hung a Local High Score board on the wall opposite from the cab.  I've got to say, the high-score board was a great idea! It has 12-14 color marquees printed about 3 inches in size and taped to a big dry erase board. Whenever we have arcade parties, we usually tweak our game list and then everyone fights to make it in the top three scorers for one of the games. A few games that we have had some heated competition on was Robotron, Ms. Pac Man, and

Aside from enjoying the cab, I have replaced the motherboard and cpu to a intel board and pentium 4 3.2ghz as well as upgraded the video card to a radeon 9800gt. The upgrade was not too much greater than what was in there before, but I had to swap out the parts because the old motherboard died on me... right before I was going to have people over for a party, of course :)

Also, I finally got around to ordering the marquee and control panel overlay from http://www.gameongrafix.com (formerly mamemarquees).

  They turned out better than I expected. The overlay has held up well with some aggressive playing and isn't showing any signs of wear. I will upload detailed photos of each later when I get home.

Also, I added a panel above the coin mechs with two usb ports. This combined with the two playstation dual shock clone usb pc controllers I got off of ebay and now, for games like TMNT, X-Men, and The Simpsons, I can plug in two controllers and we can play 4 players!

I still need to get black, round headed screws to hold the panel on, but it works great as is! 

Thats it for now. As usual, if after reading through all of this, you have any questions, feel free to drop me an email--I'll be glad to help!